FICTION

40 | HARRIMAN

THE DAUGHTEROF A

PHOTOGRAPHERFROM IN MEMORY OF MEMORY (A ROMANCE)

BY MARIA STEPANOVA TRANSLATED BY SASHA DUGDALE

HARRIMAN | 41

L et’s suppose for a

moment that we

are dealing with a

love story.

Let’s suppose it has a

main character.

This character has been

thinking of writing a book

about her family since

the age of ten. And not

just about her mother

and father, but her

grandparents and great-

grandparents whom she

hardly knew, but knew

they existed.

She promises herself she

will write this book, but

keeps putting it off, because

in order to write such a

book she needs to grow up,

and to know more.

The years pass and she

doesn’t grow up. She knows

hardly anything, and she’s

even forgotten what she

knew to begin with.

Sometimes she even

startles herself with her

unrelenting desire to say

something, anything,

about these barely seen

people who withdrew

to the shadowy side of

history and settled there.

She feels as if it is her

duty to write about them.

But why is it a duty? And

to whom does she owe

this duty, when those

people chose to stay in

the shadows?

She thinks of herself

as a product of the

family, the imperfect

output — but actually

she is the one in charge.

Her family are dependent

on her charity as the

storyteller. How she tells

it is how it will be. They

are her hostages.

She feels frightened: she

doesn’t know what to take

from the sack of stories

and names, or whether

she can trust herself, her

desire to reveal some

things and hide others.

By Marina Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale, from IN

MEMORY OF MEMORY, copyright � 2018 by Maria Stepanova.

Translation copyright � 2021 by Sasha Dugdale. Reprinted by

permission of New Directions Publishing, Corp.

This family photograph

appears at the end of

In Memory of Memory.

Courtesy of Maria Stepanova.

FICTION

42 | HARRIMAN

She is deceiving herself,

pretending her obsession

is a duty to her family,

her mother’s hopes, her

grandmother’s letters.

This is all about her and

not about them.

Others might call this

an infatuation, but she

can’t see herself through

other peoples’ eyes.

The character does

as she wishes, but she

comforts herself by

thinking that she has no

other choice.

If she’s asked how

she came to the idea

of writing a book, she

immediately tells one

of her family’s stories. If

she’s asked what it’s all

for, she tells another one.

She can’t seem to be

able to, or doesn’t want to

speak in the first person.

Although when she refers

to herself in the third

person it horrifies her.

This character is playing

a double role: trying to

behave just as her people

have always behaved,

and disappear into the

shadows. But the author

can’t disappear into the

shadows — she can’t get

away from the fact that

this book is about her.

There’s an old joke

about two Jews. One says

to the other, “You say

you’re going to Kovno,

and that means you want

me to think you’re going

to Lemburg. But I happen

to know that you really are

going to Kovno. So — why

are you trying to trick me?”

*

In Autumn 1991 my parents suddenly began to think

about emigrating. I didn’t think they should. They were

only just in their fifties, and the Soviet regime had finally

fallen — they’d waited so long for this moment. It seemed

to me that now was the time to be in Russia. Magazines

were openly printing the poems and prose we had known

only from typewritten copies passed around. Colorful

things were being sold right on the street, nothing like

the boring stuff we’d had before. With my first ever wage

I bought blue eyeshadow, patterned tights, and lacy

knickers as red as the Soviet flag. My parents wanted me

to go with them, but I held my peace and hoped they’d

change their minds.

This lasted a good while, longer than anyone could

have predicted. Permission to move to Germany came

only four years later, and even then I couldn’t believe

our inseparable life together would come to an end. But

they were in a rush and wanted me to decide. There was

nowhere else I wanted to be. Apart from anything, this

new life fascinated me, it stood half-open, constantly

inviting me in. I simply couldn’t see what was so clear

to my parents: they had lived through enough history.

They wanted to get out.

A process began, and it was somewhat like a divorce:

they left, I stayed, everyone knew what was happening,

no one spoke about it. The guts of the apartment had

been ripped out, papers and objects were divided up,

the Faulkner and Pushkin Letters disappeared, the

boxes of books stood ready-packed and waiting to be

dispatched.

My mother spent more time thinking about the

family archive than anything else. Under the Soviet

rules still in place, all old objects, whether they

belonged to the family or not, could only be taken

out of Russia if you had a certificate stating they had

no value. The country had sold priceless paintings

from the Hermitage, but it wanted to make sure

that other people’s property didn’t escape its grasp.

Grandmother’s cups and rings were sent away to

be certified, along with the old postcards and the

photographs I loved so much. Their old order was

disrupted; my mother, not trusting my memory, wrote

down names on the backs of photographs and placed

them in piles. She stuck the pictures she’d selected into

an album with a once-fashionable Japanese patterned

cover. On the first page a crooked line of writing read:

For Sarra. To remember me by, Mitya.

Now everything was in this album: everyone she

remembered by name, everyone she felt compelled

to take with her on this freshly provisioned ark.

LET'S SUPPOSE FOR A MOMENT THAT WE ARE DEALING WITH A LOVE STORY. LET'S SUPPOSE IT HAS A MAIN CHARACTER.

HARRIMAN | 43

Photo of Maria

Stepanova by her

father, Mikhail

Stepanova.

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44 | HARRIMAN

Grandmother’s school friends rubbed shoulders with

mustachioed men and the pink-cheeked children of

the London aunt, who, it’s said, became close to the

exiled Alexander Kerensky. Lyolya and Betya shared

the same page, I was there in my school photographs,

and Grandfather Nikolai sat glumly on a hill. Our

dogs, Karikha and Lina, and then me again, grown up,

aged twenty, stuck on one of the last pages, in grand

company, squeezed between two newspaper portraits

of the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov and the priest

Alexander Men. We were all listed, even Sakharov, in

my father’s hand: “Friends, Relatives, Family Members

from 1880 to 1991.”

They left on the train. It was during the hot month

of April in 1995, and the weather was celebratory: the

sky above Belorussky Station, formerly Brest Station,

in Moscow, was a giddy blue. As the train’s tail lamp

zigzagged into the distance, we who were left behind

turned and wandered back along the platform. It was

Sunday, quiet, and I was just considering whether I should

be crying when a man holding a can of beer glanced at me

from out of a train door and said: “Kill the yids and save

Russia.” It’s all too neat, but that is how it happened.

Later, I went to Germany to visit them and stayed a

month, not convinced I could build a new life there or

elsewhere. In the huge hostel in Nuremberg where ethnic

Germans from Russia occupied ten of the twelve floors,

the top two floors had been allocated to Jews, and they

were half-empty. I spent two days there, all on my own like

a Queen in my enormous empty room with ten bunk beds

fixed in two lines like a sleeping car. No one else was put

in the room with me. I was given food tokens to buy food

with, a little like green postage stamps (Germans were

given orange tokens). When I first arrived I made myself

a cup of tea and sat down to watch the European night:

in the distance, surrounded by black trees, I could see the

SHE STUCK THE PICTURES SHE'D SELECTED INTO AN ALBUM WITH A ONCE- FASHIONABLE JAPANESE PATTERNED COVER.

HARRIMAN | 45

twinkling lights of an amusement park and the shape of a

stadium. I could hear the sound of someone playing the

guitar from the floor beneath.

My parents came back to Moscow once, six months

before my mother had her operation. The coronary artery

bypass she needed was not an operation undertaken very

frequently in the 1990s, but we were sure that they’d be

good at that sort of thing in Germany. Anyway there wasn’t

much choice, the congenital heart defect first diagnosed

in wartime Yalutorovsk had deteriorated and now needed

urgent treatment. I was twenty-three, and I felt quite

grown up. We’d lived with my mother’s condition for as

long as I could remember. At the age of ten I used to wake

up and stand in the hall outside her bedroom to check that

she was still breathing. But the sun always rose and the

morning came, and all was fine. I slowly got used to it and

never asked any questions as if I was afraid of upsetting the

already delicate balance. We never properly spoke about

the operation itself, perhaps just the insignificant details

of her hospital care. So it was not to us, but to her friend

that she said wearily: “What’s to be done? I don’t have any

other option.”

Although I tried very hard to ignore all the signs that

this was her last visit to Moscow, I wondered at her

unwillingness to enjoy old memories. It was a carefree

summer, and Moscow smelt of dust and dried up ponds.

I was sure she would want to visit our old home and sit on

a bench outside on the boulevard, or go and have a look

at the school where her mother, she and I had studied.

I’d also planned a long conversation about “the olden

days” just as we’d always had in my childhood, and I was

going to make notes this time, so not a drop of precious

information would be lost. After all I was going to write this

book about our family. But my mother resisted the idea of a

nostalgic stroll, at first with her usual gentleness, and then

she simply refused point blank: I’m not interested. She

started cleaning the apartment instead and immediately

threw away some old bowls with chipped edges we’d had

since the seventies. I would never have attempted such

blasphemy and I looked at her with a mixture of shock

and excitement. The apartment was cleaned and polished

until it shone. Her school friends and relations visited,

but no one spoke the truth aloud: that they were all saying

goodbye. And then my parents left.

I remembered all of this many years later when I tried

to read the old family correspondence to my father. He

sat and listened for ten minutes with an increasingly

downcast expression, and then he said that was enough,

everything he needed to remember was in his head

anyway. Now I understand him almost too well: over the

last few months my state of mind has likened looking

at photos to reading an obituary. All of us, both the

living and the dead, seemed equally to belong to the

past, and the only possible caption: “This too will pass.”

My father’s old and new photographs in his Würzburg

apartment were the only things I could look at without

feeling shaken: the empty leaf-scattered riverbank with a

black boat, a yellow field without a single human figure,

or a meadow of a thousand forget-me-nots, no human

touch, no selectiveness, just purity and emptiness. None

of this was painful to look at, and for the first time in my

life I preferred landscape to portrait photography. The

Japanese album with the grandparents lay in a drawer

somewhere and neither of us wanted to let it out.

*

One spring I had the pleasure of spending a few

weeks in Queen’s College, Oxford, where my book and

I were received with open arms, as if my occupation

were reasonable and respectable, rather than some

embarrassing obsession, a sticky flypaper spotted with

quivering, half-dead associations. My college lodgings

had white walls lined with bookshelves, but I had

nothing to put on them. In the dining halls and libraries

memory had a different meaning, one that had so far

been alien to me. It was no longer the endpoint of a

wearisome hike, but the natural result of duration: life

generated memory, secreted it, and it deepened with

time, disturbing no one and causing no one anxiety.

I’d come to Oxford to work, but I found it hard to get

down to writing because life there was tranquil and it

GRANDMOTHER'S SCHOOL FRIENDS RUBBED SHOULDERS WITH MUSTACHIOED MEN AND THE PINK-CHEEKED CHILDREN OF THE LONDON AUNT.

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46 | HARRIMAN

made me feel stupefied, as if I’d been placed back into

a cradle that had never in fact existed. Every morning

I touched my bare feet to the old wooden floorboards

with the same feeling of gratitude. The gardens were

vessels of trembling greenery, and the nightingale

rattled its empty tin above them; even the way the

delicious rain dispensed itself on the perfect facades

and stone follies filled me with tender delight. I sat at

my desk every day with my pile of pages and stared

straight ahead.

The road outside the college was called the High, and

it loomed very large in my life. The right-hand side

of the window was turned toward the interior of the

college, and its cool shade. The left-hand side faced the

High that in sun or rain drew my gaze like a television

screen; it stubbornly refused to disappear into the

horizon as a road should and instead tilted upward

like a ship’s deck, higher and higher, so the people and

buses seemed to become more visible as they moved

away from me and no figure, however tiny, ever quite

disappeared. Against all probability they seemed to

move closer and become more distinct — even the

mosquito cyclist, the slant line of his wheels — and this

trick of perspective preoccupied me, halted my already

intermittent progress.

The endlessly fascinating life of the street moved in

intricate patterns like a puppet theater, to the hourly

ringing of bells. The long-distance coaches thundered

down the street, eclipsing the light, and at the bus stop

the drivers changed places; people appeared from a

distance and moved closer, while remaining always in

view, and sometimes deliberately standing out, like the

long-legged lanky girl who came out into the middle

of the road, performing a circus-style leap. In short,

my idleness could not be justified, but like a character

from a Jane Austen novel I sat for hours at the window

watching passersby who did not fade into oblivion,

but became larger and more recognizable with every

passing day. I was continually amazed that I could look

out of the window and count the buses at the top of the

street where it twisted away, and I became obsessed

by the way people, with their tiny jackets and even

tinier sneakers, remained forever in focus. It was like

watching the mechanism of a clock that had moving

figures to mark the hours. A large and glossy black car

turned the corner as if this was the deepest past, when

even the smallest detail gained the aura of a witness.

Only there was nothing to witness, it grew warmer and

lilac shadows brushed the opposite pavement.

Then one day Sasha took me to the Ashmolean

Museum, to see a picture by Piero di Cosimo called “The

Forest Fire.” The long horizontal picture resembled

a multiplex wide screen showing a disaster movie.

It occupied a prime position in the museum, but in

the shop there wasn’t a single postcard or coaster

with an image from the painting. Perhaps that’s

understandable, as the painting is far from any notion

of comfort. It was painted in the early sixteenth century

and is supposed to make reference to Lucretius’s poem

De Rerum Natura and contemporary controversies over

Heraclitus’s doctrines. If that is the case, then Piero

agreed with Heraclitus, who said fire coming on would

“discern and catch up with all things.” Something

similar is depicted on the wood panels of the painting:

Doomsday on the scale of a single island, overgrown

with bushes and trees and inhabited by all flesh, both

of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that

creepeth upon the earth.

The painting resembles a firework going off, as if a

carnival were taking place in the forest: flashes of red,

yellow, and white streak the panels to an inaudible and

deafening crack. The fire is not only the center of the

picture, but the omphalos of their universe, and from it the

dozens of stunned beasts canter, crawl, and fly in dotted

lines, not knowing what has happened, or who they are

now. My sense of it is that this is an image of the Big Bang,

although the painter wasn’t yet aware of such a name.

Animals, like the newly created galaxies, scatter from

a central point — you can’t look away from it, it’s like the

open door of a stove, or the mouth of a volcano. Like lava

they have not yet ceased their flowing, to the extent that

some of them have human faces. There were doubtless

SQUARES OF GLINTING PHOTOGRAPHIC PAPER FLOATED IN RIBBED TRAYS IN THE RED LIGHT OF THE BATHROOM, WHICH SERVED AS MY FATHER'S DARKROOM.

HARRIMAN | 47

also people in this world, at least there were before

the fire. They have a wooden well on an outcrop. And

there are a few people, just sketched lines, like frescoes

in Pompeii. They are definitely humanoid, although

alongside the beasts with their warm corporeality, they

look like shadows, like the outlines of humans on a wall

lit by an explosion. There is one survivor, a cowherd,

clearly drawn, standing half-turned toward us, as

bewildered as his lumbering cattle, ready to lower his

head and charge with them. His face is not visible, just

the stick, the implement he uses because he knows, like

Heraclitus, that “beasts are driven by blows.”

The beasts cross the painting in pairs, like the

inhabitants of the ark, and the fact that some are partly

human causes neither distress nor affront. The human

faces grew on the beasts as they ran — on the domestic pig

and the deer — and they are notable for their expression

of gentle thoughtfulness. It’s said that the artist added

the faces at a late stage, when the picture was nearly

finished: one theory is that they are caricatures done

at the patron’s request. Yet there is not a shadow of

comedy about these wreathed hybrids, they look more

like students of philosophy who have gathered to stroll

under the oaks. Still, even this I can’t quite comprehend

— a transformation is taking place, but its logic is hard

to grasp: is man becoming animal before our eyes, or is

animal becoming man, growing a human face, just as

it might grow horns or wings? Did Daphne become a

laurel, or did the bear become its human hunter?

It would seem that in a postapocalyptic world the

beasts are the remaining humans; and all hope resides

in these animate creatures. There they are, the family

of bears bowing fearfully before the lion’s fury; the

unbending golden eagle; the melancholic stork — all the

carriers of distinct qualities, ready to emerge as egos, as

“I”s. In contrast we, the humans, are barely distinct, we

THEN ONE DAY SASHA TOOK ME TO THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, TO SEE A PICTURE BY PIERO DI COSIMO CALLED "THE FOREST FIRE."

FICTION

seem no more than raw material, or rough drafts for a

future that might or might not come to pass. The rest

were saved and they inherited the earth, and walked

upon it, live and blocklike like the figures in paintings

by Pirosmani or Henri Rousseau.

It’s surprising that the focus of the picture falls not on

the predator, the King of Beasts, but on the harmless

ruminant. A bull with the powerful brow of a thinker

stands dead center, aligned with the tree of knowledge,

which divides the picture into two equal parts, and the

furnace mouth of the fire. His expression of tortured

reflection makes him look a little like the sinner in

Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment,” mouth opened in

incomprehension, furrowed face. But here the creature is

without original sin and it has a choice: the bull is free to

decide whether or not it becomes a human.

In the dark days of 1937 the German-Jewish art historian

Erwin Panofsky described Piero di Cosimo’s pictures as

the “emotional atavisms” of a “primitive who happened

to live in a period of sophisticated civilization.” Rather

than a civilized sense of nostalgia, Piero is in the grip of a

desperate longing for the disappeared past. In my view

this interpretation stems from the age-old desire to see the

artist as “other,” as a transported creature, an Indigenous

person at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, a Martian

on a foreign planet. It might be worth arguing but he is

right in one important way: the state of mind he describes

is also a sort of metamorphosis, the result of a terrible

disaster that has thrown the world out of joint.

In “The Forest Fire” we see the moment of exposure,

the flash, when light burns out the image and replaces

it with the blinding white of nonexistence. The point

at which everything shifts into its final shape is beyond

memory and impossible to convey. It’s the moment we

first open our eyes.

Piero di Cosimo’s picture is for me a close equivalent

of Courbet’s “L’origine du monde” — its exact rhythm,

even the way it shocks and spellbinds, is the same. This

equivalence is due in part to the directness of the message,

the documentary scale of the narrative of the formation

of the universe, how it casts off new detail, forcing life

to roll ever onward down the eternally angled slope. Is

catastrophe then simply the starting point of genesis?

The kiln for firing small clay figures? The crucible for

transmutation? This is how creation happens in a post-

Promethean world, and this is how the fall from heaven

48 | HARRIMAN

HARRIMAN | 49

must have looked in an age of aerial warfare and chemical

weapons — the flaming sword of the forest fire, and

partridges swooping in the skies, triangular as jet fighters.

*

In one of the exercise books where my mother wrote

down all my childish phrases and conversations, right at

the top of a lined page filled with notes about summer and

dandelions and cows, she has written: My mother died today.

And we didn’t know.

I remember that day well. I can see in my mind’s eye

the morning light in an unfamiliar building; a huge dog

coming out from under the table, which was too high for

me; the strange window frames; and then later that day,

a vast stretch of water, as far as the edge of the world, and

bobbing and flickering in it, my mother’s head, for my

mother had decided to swim out into this waste of water,

and had near vanished. I was certain she was gone — a new

and strange life had just begun and I was completely alone.

I didn’t even cry, I stood on the bank of the river Oka,

where it meets the Volga, and there was no one to hear

me. When the adults swam back, laughing, something had

changed irrevocably.

I don’t really think life can begin with a catastrophe,

especially not one that happened a long time before

us. Misfortune, sweeping low and fierce overhead like

an Orthodox banner, crackling with burning twigs and

tongues of white flame — maybe it’s simply a condition

of our existence, the maternal womb from which we

emerge screaming with pain. Maybe it isn’t even worthy

of the name Misfortune. When we got home that August

and went out to our dacha, grandmother’s bouquets of

dried flowers decorated the walls, and her bag still held

her purse and season ticket; it smelt of phlox; and our

life was already arranged for years to come, like a song

with a repeating refrain. Grandmother Lyolya was only

fifty-eight, she died of a heart attack before we could come

home to her. And now my mother’s life had been given its

shape, its model for imitation. If up till then she had just

been wandering along, following her heart, now she had

an impossible standard to meet. She never spoke it aloud,

but she seemed to want to become someone different,

for herself, for us: she wanted to become Lyolya, with her

easy hospitality, her radiating joy, her cakes and hugs. She

couldn’t do it, no one could.

The story of our home, as I heard it, began not a hundred

years ago, but in August 1974. Grandmother reluctantly let

my mother and me go off on holiday, away from summer

at the dacha with its curtains, patterned with red and green

apples. When we returned it was to an empty house, and

we were alone. My mother blamed herself, and I sat by her.

I remembered the terrifying story of the little girl who was

slow to bring water to her sick mother and by the time she

got to her mother, it was too late. Birds flew overhead, and

one of them was her mother, and it sang: too late too late I

won’t come back. Somehow this story seemed to be about us,

although no one had precisely said this. I just knew it, and I

wept over the untouched water like an accomplice.

All my later knowledge was in light of this story: my

mother spoke, and I fearfully tried to remember everything

although I still forgot. I ran away, like the child in the story,

to play, to grow up and live a little. I think that must be how

she felt too, a young woman, younger than I am now, with

her exercise book of recipes written out in pencil, and her

dependents: a two-year-old daughter and two old people

who no longer recognized themselves or each other. Later

she began wearing Sarra’s wedding ring; on the inside it

had the name Misha, which was my father’s name as well.

Nothing ever comes to an end.

Squares of glinting photographic paper floated in ribbed

trays in the red light of the bathroom, which served as

my father’s darkroom. I was allowed to watch as shapes

appeared: the complete blankness was suddenly roiled

with lines and angles and they slowly became a coherent

whole. I loved the contact sheets best of all, covered in

miniature images that could potentially be enlarged to

any size, just like me at that age. The tiny portraits of my

parents fitted in my pocket and made the evenings spent

at nursery school more bearable. I remember my parents

realizing I’d torn the picture of my father out of his

passport so I could keep it with me.

THIS BOOK IS COMING TO AN END. EVERYTHING I WASN'T ABLE TO SAVE IS SCATTERING IN ALL DIRECTIONS.

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50 | HARRIMAN

My own first camera was a little plastic Soviet 35mm, a

Smena-8, with dials to change the aperture and shutter

speed. I was given it as a present when I was ten, and

I immediately set about saving and preserving: the

graying pines, the sleepers at the railway halt, someone

my parents knew, water running over the stones — all

industriously rescued from oblivion. The images, lifted

from the fixing tray with tongs, dried on a line, but didn’t

regain their former vitality. I soon gave it up, but I didn’t

learn my lesson.

This book is coming to an end. Everything I wasn’t

able to save is scattering in all directions, like the dumpy

birds in “The Forest Fire.” I have no one to tell that Abram

Ginzburg’s wife was called Rosa, I’ll never write about

Sarra’s joke, in the middle of the war, that mold was good

because it produced penicillin. Or how grandfather Lyonya

demanded that Solzhenitsyn’s dissident masterpiece The

Gulag Archipelago (despite strenuous efforts to get hold of

it) be removed from the apartment after only one night

as it would “kill us all.” Not even how all the women in the

Moscow communal apartment would gather in the kitchen

with tubs and towels to chatter through the weekly ritual

of a pedicure. Or even that a squirrel lived on the balcony

of a Moscow apartment seventy years ago. The squirrel had

a wheel and it would run round and round, watched by a

little girl.

In the 1890s the family in Pochinky sat down at the table

for dinner every evening and waited silently for their meal.

The soup was brought in. Amid the silence Father took the

lid off the tureen and a cloud of fragrant steam rose. He

would sniff the soup and then make a pronouncement:

“I doubt it’s any good” — only after this the soup could be

served. The terrifying paterfamilias always drank down all of

his soup and asked for more.

Before Mikhailovna became Lyolya’s nanny, she was

married to a soldier. In the drawers of the archive where

everything has settled like sediment, there are three

photographs and an icon. The icon shows the Virgin

Mary appearing to Russian troops somewhere in the

Galician marshes. The three photographs told the story of

Mikhailovna’s life: here she is as a young woman standing

head-to-head with a dour and innately weary man in a

worker’s smock. And here she is holding a pitifully skinny

little baby. The last picture shows the man in the cap

and thick greatcoat of a soldier. Her husband was killed,

the baby died; her entire earthly estate consisted of the

paper icon, depicting a Pre-Raphaelitish Madonna, and

once framed by a heavy silver surround that my great-

grandfather gave her. When life got hard again after

the revolution, she secretly took the silver surround

off the icon, sold it, and brought the money back to the

household she stayed with for the rest of her life. In

all later photographs Mikhailovna is in her own icon-

surround of pale gray, her cone-shaped black headscarf

covering everything except her face. All that is left of her

are a few cheap religious images and a Psalter that she read

every evening.

Aunt Galya made me a present of a colorful Indian

dress not long before her death, saying that she’d only

worn it once, “for half an hour, when I had a dog come

in here.” I knew of her secret and unrequited love for her

neighbor who walked his dog in the yard and who died

without ever guessing why she used to come out every

evening to see him.

Sometimes it seems like it is only possible to love the

past if you know it is definitely never going to return. If

I had expected a small box of secrets to be hidden at my

journey’s end, something like one of Joseph Cornell’s

boxes, then I would have been disappointed. Those places

where the people of my family walked, sat, kissed, went

down to the river’s edge, or jumped onto streetcars, the

towns where they were known by face and name — none of

them revealed themselves to me. The green and indifferent

battlefield was overgrown with grass. Like a computer

game I hadn’t mastered, all the prompts lead to the wrong

gates, the secret doors were just blank walls, and nobody

remembered anything. And this is for the best: the poet

Alexander Blok tells us that no one comes back. The poet

Mikhail Gronas replies that “living comes of oblivion.”

The parcel had been packed with all possible care, the

box was lined with cigarette paper and each of the items

was wrapped in the same thin, opaque stuff. I freed each

one from its swaddling, and they lay on the dining table in

a line so you could see all their dents, all their cracks, the

earth ingrained in the china, the absences where feet, legs,

hands should have been. Most of them still had heads, and

some even had their little socks, the only item of toilet they

were permitted. But on the whole they were naked and

white, as if they had just been born, with all their dents and

flaws. Frozen Charlottes, representatives of the population

of survivors; they seem like family to me — and the less I can

say about them, the closer they come. ■

About the Author

While readying for publication Maria Stepanova’s “The

Daughter of a Photographer,” the final chapter of her

In Memory of Memory (A Romance), it was announced

that the English translation by poet Sasha Dugdale

had been shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker

Prize. Stepanova is only the third Russian writer to

be so honored.

Maria Stepanova (b. 1972, Moscow) has long played a

central role in post-Soviet culture as leading poet of her

generation, essayist, and editor-in-chief of Colta.ru,

the enormously influential online publication. The

prestigious Andrei Belyi Prize and Joseph Brodsky

Fellowship are among her many awards. In Memory of

Memory solidified her reputation with the Bolshaya Kniga

Award and the NOS Literary Prize, not to mention the

dozens of translations and reviews that have appeared in

the international press.

Stepanova’s documentary novel opens with the death

of her aunt and the task of sifting through what has been

left behind—photographs, postcards, diaries, letters—as

she attempts to reconstruct the story of how an ordinary

Jewish family survived the events of the last century.

As the narrator writes in this chapter, she has been

“thinking of writing a book about her family since the

age of ten.” In the process she takes part in a dialogue

with such writers as Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan

Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam.

Twenty twenty-one is the Year of Stepanova with the

publication of two other translations: War of the Beasts

and the Animals (Bloodaxe Books), her first book of poetry

in English translation, also translated by the superb

Dugdale; and The Voice Over: Poems and Essays, edited by

Irina Shevelenko (Columbia University Press).

Stepanova will be in residence this fall in Columbia's

Department of Slavic Languages, where she will teach

the course Between History and Story: (Post) Memory.

HARRIMAN | 51

In Memory of Memory (A Romance)

Maria Stepanova; Sasha Dugdale (Translator)

New Directions (2021)

ISBN-10 : 0811228835, ISBN-13 : 978-0811228831